I am telling you now before it happens. —John 13:19 Several times Jesus gave his disciples advance warning, then added, “I am telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe” (Jn 13:19; 14:29; 16:4). Is trouble invading your […]
Don’t be alarmed. —Matthew 24:6 Jesus warned his disciples that disheartening times would come: wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, deceivers, false prophets. “But don’t be alarmed,” he said. He didn’t want his followers to be caught up in the panic that grips unbelievers. Sometimes it seems that evil is winning, but it isn’t.
I know your soul is doing fine. —3 John 2 Horatio Spafford had a peaceful and happy life with his wife Anna and their four daughters. In November 1873, Anna and the girls boarded the S.S. Ville du Harve for a vacation to Europe. In mid-Atlantic, the ship
Jesus sat in Simon’s boat and preached to the beach bunch. Then he turned to Simon and said, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch” (Lk 5:4). Say what?! On the face of it, there were two things badly off base with this suggestion. One, the timing was wrong:
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Come to me, all of you who are weary and overburdened. —Matthew 11:28 When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, he went straight to the temple and created chaos: overturned tables and benches, ousted commercial culprits and laid into them for making the house of prayer a den of robbers (Mt 21:12–13). The next sentence
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Like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand. —Jeremiah 18:6 Carpenters do two things: they make things and fix things. Jesus was a carpenter. He made us: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (Jn 1:3). But we stumble, fall, get
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What do you have that God hasn’t given you? —1 Corinthians 4:7 “What do you have that God hasn’t given you? And if all you have is from God, why boast as though you have accomplished something on your own?” (1 Cor
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Teach us how short our lives really are so that we may be wise. —Psalm 90:12 A couple of hundred years from now historians will look back at this year with as much fascination as we look back on the world of George Washington or Bonnie and Clyde. They’ll try to picture
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Powerful is your arm! Strong is your hand! —Psalm 89:13 On Christmas Eve 1939, four months into the havoc of World War II, King George VI reached out to the ears of British citizens in a BBC radio broadcast. He closed his speech with the preamble to Minnie Louise Haskins’ The Gate of the
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Be ready! You don’t know when the time will come. —Mark 13:33 Every generation has had a few noisy, self-declared prophets who have screeched that they have nailed down the exact date of the world’s end. They’ve all been wrong. No surprise there, for Jesus said: “No one knows the day or the
